The Hunt is Off

Time to cross another "prestige film" off my list. I recently sat down to watch The Deer Hunter, the 1978 Oscar Winner for Best Picture, entry on the AFI top 100, and one of IMDB's top 250. Actually, I should say I carved out the time to watch the film -- it's an epic movie clocking in at three hours. And in my view, it doesn't remotely sustain interest for that long. Frankly, it doesn't even start getting interesting until well over an hour into it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For those who might not know, this is a film about the Vietnam era. It follows a group of friends in a small country town who all decide to enlist in the Army together, dreams of adventure and heroism in their minds. The film is a gritty look at the true horror of war, and in particular how soldiers are never the same after coming home from it.

To really set this up well, it is fairly important to spend a little time with the characters before they go off to war. A little time, in my opinion. But The Deer Hunter devotes over an hour to this, and it quickly passes into tedium, and on to numbing. We see one of the men getting married, and I swear we must actually watch half the ceremony and all of the reception -- the movie just keeps crawling on and on and on without getting anywhere. We see them on a hunting trip, joking with each other on the way there, more minutia than I can possibly remember.

And then, before you can blink, we're watching these men captured in Vietnam, forced to play Russian Roulette by their captors. It's a deliberately jarring transition, but by this point I was near comatose; the movie had dug too deep a hole to ever crawl out of.

There are lots of great actors in the film -- Robert De Niro, John Savage, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep. And they do at times give great performances. But most of the time they're being called upon to aimlessly screw around. The compelling scenes are just too few and far between.

I think the praise bestowed on this movie stems solely from the point it was making, and the time in which it was making it. It is a valuable point, but I don't think the movie made it well at all. I suppose that decades on, the style of making a "war is hell" movie has radically shifted. In any case, I found The Deer Hunter to be all but unwatchable, especially compared to the great films that have been made more recently. (Saving Private Ryan comes to mind.) I rate the movie a D-. To date, it's the worst "Best Picture" I've ever seen.